Book Arts Press Valentines

[Terry Belanger <tb3e@poe.acc.virginia.edu>]

A number of persons have asked me why the Book Arts Press publishes
annual posters containing Valentine's Day Thoughts. We began issuing
them at Columbia University 21 years ago; and, since these posters are
our best-known publications (I suspect that a great many ExLibris
subscribers have seen at least one of them hung up on somebody's wall
at one time or another), there may be some general interest in knowing
how the tradition began.

The first Valentine's Day Thought (VDT), hand-printed in 1975 in blue
ink on light blue poster-sized paper, was enabled by Maurice
Annenberg's 1974 gift to the Book Arts Press (BAP) of 48 cases of wood
type, many of them containing sans serif faces in large sizes. We
wanted an occasion to use this wood type (not easy when your largest
flatbed press's platen is 14" x 18"; and we were also looking for
money-making opportunities: these were the days when the BAP sold
hand-printed Christmas cards out its front door on the fifth floor of
Butler Library every year as another part of its effort to get enough
cash together to buy a sufficient quantity of printing type in text
sizes for use in class exercises in my descriptive bibliography course
at the Columbia School of Library Service (SLS).

The first VDT was 60 PERCENT OF ALL MAMMALS ARE NOCTURNAL, and--at 25
cents each--copies went fast (my recollection is that we sold well over
a hundred of them). Their sale helped enable the purchase (from Pat
Taylor's Out of Sorts Letter Foundry) of about 200# of 14-point
Monotype Caslon 337; and in the spring of 1975 we produced our first
pamphlet, reprinting a 1730s piece relating to the Hogarth Act called
_The Case of Designers, Engravers, Etchers, &c. Stated_. Among the
members of the SLS desbib class of '75 who worked on the pamphlet were
John Bidwell, Victor Cardell, Inge Dupont, Caroline Hover [now]
Schimmel, Clark Kimball, Bruce McKittrick, Richard Marcus, Alice
Schreyer, and Samuel A. Streit.

The message of the 1976 VDT was probably the most successful of the
series thus far: EVEN SUPERMAN IS CLARK KENT MOST OF THE TIME,
suggested by Kay Vandergrift. The subsequent VDTs were:

77   No act is so private that it does not seek applause
        [John Updike; when the Dean of SLS saw this one, he said
        he wanted 14 copies, one for each member of his faculty]

78   Take what you want God says and pay for it
        [suggested by Harold Berliner, who said it was an old
        Spanish proverb]

79   In skating over thin ice our safety lies in our speed
        [Emerson]

80   If the sun rises in the west don't pay the rent
81   It is useless to go to bed to save the light if the result
     is twins
        [These two came out of a list of fortune cookie fortunes
        I came across in an old printer's manual]

82   It is easier to stay out than get out
        [Attributed to Mark Twain]

83   If you play with something long enough it will break
84   Play the hand you're dealt
85   It is unwise to play leapfrog with a unicorn
86   Pain is a privilege of the living

87   One sign of an impending nervous breakdown is the conviction
     that your work is terribly important
        [Bertrand Russell]

88   There is only so much value in thinking about things you
     can't control

89   Nobody promised fair
        [suggested by Carol Learmont]

90   Change is neither merciful nor just
91   You never stop learning what you can give up
        [Paul Monette]

92   You can be in two places at once but not three
93   Mess is lore

94   I was put on earth to accomplish a certain number of things
     and I am so far behind that I will never die
        [suggested by Katharine Kyes Leab]

95   I could relax I suppose/on the other hand you could work
     harder
        [suggested by Jim Sitter]

96   Nature rewards wisdom and skill with unerring justice but
     has no regard whatever for good intentions
        [Nelson Aldrich]

Members of our support group, the Friends of the Book Arts Press,
always receive a VDT, on the day itself if we can manage it. It is the
only Valentine that most of them receive, they tell me (nobody promised
fair: this year we sent out 749 Valentines and got three in return). In
1987 (I think it was), I stopped printing VDTs by hand (the press-run
had got above 400, and printing that many of them far enough in advance
of mailing day and hanging them up to get them dry enough to fold
without offsetting became a real hassle).

In 1990 we issued a group poster containing the VDTs thus far published
(cut up, one poster produces 16 different postcard- size Thoughts)--and
that's the story so far. We sell copies of the group poster (intact or
cut up) for $5 postpaid, and we have copies for sale of all of the
individual VDTs since 1987 ($5 postpaid for the first one sent unfolded
and rolled in a mailing tube and $1 for each subsequent one sent in the
same tube; $1 each postpaid sent folded). All of the individual VDTs
produced before 1987 are out of print.

Incidentally, most of the VDTs the Book Arts Press sent out earlier
this month arrived a day early--with the exception of recipients in the
northern DC and Baltimore areas, who (inexplicably) got late delivery.


-- 
Terry Belanger  :  University Professor  :   University of Virginia
Book Arts Press : 114 Alderman Library : Charlottesville, VA  22903
Tel: 804/924-8851   FAX: 804/924-8824  email: belanger@virginia.edu
            URL: http://poe.acc.virginia.edu/~oldbooks/